Getting Things in Order

Making another attempt to get my everything organized this weekend:

• Starting to use Remember The Milk for my to-do list again. I was using this lovely service for a while before getting into OmniFocus back at Dundas... They've got a BB10 app (presumably just a repackage of their Android app) which is nice, but I'm not willing to pay $25 a year (yikes!) for "Pro". Maybe I'll find another to-do/task/GTD app for mobile that lets me sync with desktop or web...


• Checking out You Need A Budget... it comes highly recommended, and I'd really like to automate our budget. Lynette handles it (I can't be trusted to remember to pay bills on time, d'oh), but spends way too much time/effort. I've never found a computery method that she liked though... None of the free budgeting tools let you enter a recurring paycheque every two weeks, which seems like a serious oversight.


• Also trying out Zoundry's Raven for the first time. Seems to do a nice job of letting me write this blog post and get it posted.

Finally starting to get used to typing on the wacky Canadian Bi-Lingual keyboard on my new laptop; I'd still rather replace it with a standard US English keyboard, but Lenovo and IBM can't seem to figure out how to sell me one. Sure I could eBay a German one, but that would probably be even more of a challenge...

Powered by Zoundry Raven

Imported

Just finished importing my old Posterous blogs (via their AutoPost feature) by hand, and then fixing the posting date on all of them by hand. Pity the Blogger folks never whipped up an "import from Posterous" tool.

Cobwebs...

As I'm sure nobody noticed ;-), I've started mucking about with this blog.

I'd actually forgotten I had it. I think I set up Posterous (RIP) shortly after creating this one, and then there's Twitter... But lately I've been thinking I want to write some longer entries.

We'll see if I manage to remember to do this or not. I did find a nice Windows blogging app called Raven, so maybe that'll help.

Seriously, this is why I hate Java.

I want to download W3C's Unicorn, because it validates your HTML, CSS, etc. and makes sure you're not doing anything stupid. The pages I need to validate are internal, highly confidential, etc. so I can't send them out into the web for testing.
I need to run Unicorn locally. So, I check out the installation docs:
Download the source code
The code is only available for download from the Mercurial repository. To download it, use the command
hg clone https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/unicorn
Compile Unicorn
To compile Unicorn easily, Apache Ant and Ivy are required. From Unicorn's directory, run:
ant retrieve generate_observer generate_tasklist default_conf war
Here's what I get from ant:

cherborth@cherborth-lt [578]$ ant retrieve Buildfile: /Users/cherborth/src/unicorn/build.xml  retrieve:  BUILD FAILED /Users/cherborth/src/unicorn/build.xml:18: Problem: failed to create task or type antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant:retrieve  Cause: The name is undefined.  Action: Check the spelling.  Action: Check that any custom tasks/types have been declared.  Action: Check that any / declarations have taken place.  No types or tasks have been defined in this namespace yet   This appears to be an antlib declaration.  Action: Check that the implementing library exists in one of:  -/opt/local/share/java/apache-ant/lib  -/Users/cherborth/.ant/lib  -a directory added on the command line with the -lib argument    Total time: 0 seconds

On the Ivy website, the sample, simple demo build.xml file doesn't work either.
Fucking Java dependencies, build environments, runtime environments, you drive me NUTS. The docs for Ivy and (in particular) Unicorn are absolutely no help here.

Wednesday in Waterloo

'Twas a bit foggy Wednesday morning...

Spongebob money shot

This is vaguely disturbing...

Had to decorate my office a bit

There's this window right over my desk, with frosted glass... You can see it from out in the hall where there are some stairs.
Sent from my BlackBerry.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Had to put our cat Wembly down

Shitty morning, had to put our cat Wembly down today. It wasn't just a respiratory infection bothering her, she seems to have developed cancer in her sinus and/or skull… not entirely sure because we didn't want to put her through tests and surgery.

Google URL "decoration" sure is annoying, how do you turn it off?

Remember when you could search for stuff in Google, select something in the results and choose “Copy hyperlink” or whatever in your browser, then paste that URL into an email or whatever?
If you do it now, you get some massive Google URL so they can track you even better than usual.
For example, if I search for “CBC” on Google, I get this instead of http://cbc.ca/ (which is what the status bar says when you hover over the link):
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcbc.ca%2F&ei=44HBTOmwKYSnnAevtIDVCQ&usg=AFQjCNGj-jfLDKQ8DaBg9Fe6xZdMMCRkkg
Everything except http%3A%2F%2Fcbc.ca%2F is Google being nosier than normal.
 I thought logging in to my Google account would let me turn this off, but I can’t seem to find the option that controls it, if there is one.